Scribbles and notes and even some pictures

Menu

Rant

I’m so irritated today, so irritated, that I’m pretty sure I have a psychotic smile on my face. That’s how bad it is. Laughably bad. Irritated by things that don’t matter, and some that do.

But one of the things that kind of just pushed me over the edge happened at the dentist today.

At first, I was happy because I had a new hygienist, and it was nice because she didn’t lecture me on the importance of having children (which, by the way, Zach doesn’t get this lecture) and how being a mom is the bestest thing ever, unless you have a daughter, and it becomes awful because she will turn into a mouthy little slut. I kind of wish I was exaggerating, but I’m not. The last hygienist I had complained about her daughter being sinful with her boyfriend, and maybe being around too many gay people THE ENTIRE TIME. She took like 45 minutes cleaning my teeth because she spent so much time freaking out about this. And while sometimes I might dress like an elderly woman, and while my music tastes reflect that of someone in their 90s, I don’t give any shits about teenagers doing teenager-y things. If it’s not on my lawn, I don’t care. And as a personal philosophy, I am judging a parent SO HARD if they put moral judgments and conditional love on their kids. SO HARD ARE MY JUDGMENTS.

So the new lady was awesome and talked about her dogs the whole time and how much fun it is to sleep. My kind of person.

But after my appointment I had to wait for Zach to finish his. So I brought The Sound and the Fury to read while I waited. It was fine until this guy, middle-aged, came in and said,

“Wow, The Sound and the Fury. Classic.”

I nodded politely and went back to reading.

Like the asshole he ended up being, he went on,

“Are you reading that for school, or for pleasure?”

“Pleasure.” I continued reading.

I know I’m spoiling things, but like the biggest asshole ever, he continued,

“Wow, I don’t ever see girls like you and your age reading books like that. All girls your age just have their faces in their phones. I see all the girls at high school wandering around staring at their phones all day. That’s all they do.”

Looking at him appalled, and also wondering how old he thinks I am. He continues:

“I don’t want you to get offended by this, but this is true: This is better than an IUD (pulls out phone). Honestly! Girls would rather be on their phones than have sex. Pretty soon, the Pope will be recommending them. Don’t you agree?”

At this point, I’m beyond anywhere near my comfort zone, in fact I’ve lost all semblance of any grounding. I continued to read and tried my best to ignore him.

I’m honestly not blowing this out of proportion. In fact, I left out all the creepy body language, and most of what he said, because it mostly was just offensive and implied I was a teenage girl. I’m pushing 30!

When Zach was finally done, I told him the exchange, and he was appalled, but also surprised I didn’t blow up at the guy. I asked, “What was I supposed to do? Tell him he’s being a sexist asshole and to stop talking to me? Because then I’d be ‘making a scene’ in the office and people would think it was me being rude.”

It wasn’t like the guy was blatantly trying to be awful. And I guarantee every girl has a story like this one. I have a million more. Some guy will seemingly be friendly, and totally be a creep in an underhanded way, and there’s nothing you can do. This happened ALL THE TIME when I was a teenager, but I never understood why I was uncomfortable.

Unfortunately, when people treat me like this, I still don’t know what to do. “Family” members do this. The last family wedding I went to, this happened. But what am I supposed to do? Everyone writes off my complaints as, “that’s just the way he is/he doesn’t mean anything by it.”

Well you know what? It’s unacceptable. I should haven’t to worry about a creepy uncle coming at me with disgusting and inappropriate comments about my mind or body, just because he’s been a creepy asshole forever. You know why he’s a creepy asshole? No one told him to stop. And everyone told anyone who complained that it was fine that he was like that.

If this was an isolated event, I’d be pissed, but I would ultimately brush it off. But this isn’t isolated. I’ve had to put up with this shit my whole life. And today was so blatant and obvious that it kind of hurt my feelings a little bit. That’s it. It hurt my feelings. It hurt for someone to imply that because I was young (apparently I have a calling in undercover work at high schools) and pretty, that it was a miracle I was reading a “real” book. It hurt my feelings that he was talking about women’s bodies like something that needed to be controlled, like sex is something bad, it’s the teenage girl’s “fault” for getting pregnant, and luckily girls are so dumb and shallow they won’t have sex. It hurts. And for some reason, there’s definitely a weird psychological thing that happens when an older person talks down to me, like I don’t have the right to stand up for myself.

So when someone is so hurtful, even though he’s smiling and laughing like it’s all lighthearted, like it’s no big deal, it’s hard to find that voice inside myself to say, “Stop. You’re an awful human being. Leave my sight immediately.”

Because this is normal. This is so so normal. But it’s not right!

I mean, eventually, I WILL become an elderly woman, and I won’t have a problem saying what’s on my mind, because elderly people are awesome like that. Until then, I guess I need to work up the courage to politely tell people off. I’m sure there’s a WikiHow tutorial, if not, I will dedicate years of research and figure out how to do it.

So FYI, after a quick search, my favorite thing was on reddit and my favorite response was: “I ask you to slowly and carefully go fuck yourself.”

That may be not helpful, but it gave me a chuckle. And that will definitely be my response when I’m old, and knitting.

Like this:

OK, today I feel a lot better. I’m even drinking my morning tea. Thank god. Just in time for Friday and the weekend. I got a little more sleep this morning, and more cuddles with dogs, so that made it better. Although, I had a nightmare about super tornadoes in the UK, which was weird, and now I’m wondering if I have the most awesome, meaningful and abstract dreams.

Sometimes it’s really hard to calm my mind. The world is loud, chaotic, and at many times, really terrible. Sometimes, I argue with myself on whether or not it’s a bad thing. I mean, the human race needs to figure stuff out for itself. Change takes time, it’s not something that happens overnight. Paradigms shift.

But it’s really hard to have such a cavalier attitude when like, children are being bombed, journalists tortured, and civil disobedience being labeled as “terrorism.” Also, it pisses me off that the NSA is probably cataloging this blog because I’m using disruptive speech. I’d encrypt it, but then I’d lose what little readership I have. That, and this blog isn’t an activism blog, but I digress.

The thing is, I’d really like to think we could live in a world with perfect harmony, but I don’t actually believe that. That would mean everyone thought and believed the same about everything. Ugh, how boring! That would be the opposite of progress. However, I don’t think what’s going on now is any more productive. We need balance, and we need to shift focus away from religion and trivial things to humanity and what’s best for the planet. Humans, so selfish and thinking we run things – ha!

Right now, I’m sitting outside in my back yard writing, listening to birds and watching a bee take his sweet time with the sage bush. There’s a cool breeze. Seems like I’m having such a zen morning, right? It would be, except my dog Penny is upset with the other dogs and wants me to hold her and Layla is stalking that poor bee, so I’m having to tell her to “leave it” every five seconds so she won’t murder it. And my poor lilies… Zach accidentally got wasp spray on them and they fried, but today, two of the buds bloomed. They just look even sadder. Even my time out in nature gets stressful.

By the way, that’s a yellow jacket on the lily. WTF??

And yet, being out here, daydreaming and letting my mind wander – it still makes me happy. I feel refreshed. I feel like I can get it all done. I don’t feel hopeless.

OK, enough of that! Tomorrow is Friday, so that means… movie review! I’ll be watching Heathers. I’m excited, you should be too. I also have a few recipes I need to post, but I’ve been really lazy in that department. I’ll do that next week. And for the garden/yard geeks, there’s more of that in a couple of weeks.

Like this:

My brain finally decided to meander its way back into my head. Vacations can be rough as an “adult” person because everything seems to pile on while you’re away. I finally caught up with my classwork and revisited my goals – I’m on track with some, and not so much with others. That’s OK. They’re still getting done, I’ve just had to readjust some things. I’ve also been thinking about this blog, and I decided that on Fridays, I’m going to post a review on a film that’s either not mainstream, or is an older flick. Let’s see if I can put my degree to use with some B movies. Oh, and all of them will be streaming on Netflix (at least at the time of writing my blog), so everyone can share in the fun!

So I’ve been debating all morning on whether or not to write about something incredibly controversial, but incredibly important to me. I was going to write something on the fourth of July, but man, would it have been a different post!

I’m going to bring it up.

I’m losing a lot of my rights in my country and state, and I’m pissed about it.

I don’t want to rehash everything that’s already been said, in every way possible. That would be a waste of my time and yours. Everyone already has their opinions on the matter, even if their opinions are completely based in falsities, it doesn’t matter. People like to throw politics into everything and it ruins any hope of intelligent thought. And guess what? You know what politics helps? Politicians. It helps no one. When you align yourself with any political group, you are, in essence, totally screwing yourself over. Because they don’t care about you, and they want us (the people) to fight each other, and ignore all the shitty things they are doing to ALL OF US. You may not believe me, but I am on everyone’s side – the side of humanity. I just can’t side with any political thoughts.

OK, enough of that rant.

Yesterday, I was listening to “This Land is Your Land” in the car when I picked Zach up from the bus stop. This is arguably one of the most “American” songs out there, and with the exception of “America the Beautiful,” one of our non-official anthems. Most people know the words to this song, even when they don’t know our national anthem. Seriously, this is one of my favorite songs, I don’t know why, but it’s just so beautiful and I love it.

What’s hilarious is that this song was written by an outspoken pro-union, communist during the depression era. Ha!

Anyway, Zach asked me what was wrong, and I told him I needed to listen to something that reminded me why I even stay in America, let alone love it. Because seriously, I was ready to abandon ship and move to somewhere like Norway, where women are seen as people, and I’m free to not worship anything without people looking at me like I love the dark lord.

So we both listed off things we loved. Mostly, they were people. People like Woody Guthrie, who loved America so much he wanted to make it better. He saw a different America, and through his songs, we can remember a really dark time in our country (with hope). He was hunted by the US government, and he still loved it. You really can hear it in his lyrics. I can name so many people like him that I admire, from the ever popular Bob Dylan to the more obscure, like Wanda Sykes or, Wil Wheaton. But Woody really holds a large chunk of my spirit.

Now, at the end of the conversation, I wasn’t like, “Oh, the US has its problems but it could be a lot worse!” Yes, that’s true, but it could also be a lot better. There are over a dozen countries that rate higher in everything over us, so I’m not going to be delusional. But I felt a little more grounded. I really do love it here. Sometimes I feel like I am constantly fighting an uphill battle, and I get tired. For instance, I shouldn’t have to constantly defend myself. I shouldn’t be accused of being disrespectful because I spoke up when someone says something wrong to me. Damn, it’s OK if I have different opinions than you. Stop being so insecure and dismissing mine as a sign of disrespect and subversion.

Whoops, got off track.

Anyway, I love America. I think I’ll stay here a while longer. Besides, I’ve never been one to shy away from a fight.